A lecture co-sponsored by the McGill IAIN Indonesia Social Equity Project and the Institute of Islamic Studies.
Azyumardi Azra is professor of history at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN or State Islamic University), Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, Indonesia. Born in West Sumatra, he graduated from the Faculty of Tarbiyah (Islamic Education), IAIN (State Institute for Islamic Studies) Jakarta (1982). In 1986 he won a Fullbright Scholarship to pursue his advanced studies at Columbia University, New York City and got his MA (1988) from the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Winning Columbia President Fellowship, he moved to Department of History, Columbia University, where he got another MA (1989), MPhil (1990), and PhD (1992) with dissertation on “The Transmission of Islamic Reformism to Indonesia: Networks of Middle Eastern and Malay-Indonesian `Ulama in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”. He was elected as Rector of IAIN/UIN Jakarta in October 1998; and was reelected in August 2002 for the second term. His book Renaisans Islam di Asia Tenggara (Renaissance of Islam in Southeast Asia) won the national award as the best book of the year 1999 in the field of humanities and social sciences.